Parabola's Summer 1986 issue: Mirrors  "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created He him," declares the first book of our scriptures, and for ages past the saints and philosophers have pondered this concept. Plato taught that the world is a reflection of the ideas in the mind of God; St. Bonaventure called the human spirit a "sullied mirror" in which the divine can shine. How can this be understood? Mankind seems far from the likeness of any god we would wish to worship, and our life in the world hardly reflects divinity. If there is a relation, let alone a resemblance, between us and the consciousness that created us, we tend to disclaim it and to draw a hard line between that divinity and our humanity, justifying the weaknesses common to us all as "human nature" and therefore excusable if not positively praiseworthy. But if mankind was made in God's image, the very essence of humanity must reflect, in some way, deity; and again we come to the question: how can we look at this? --from "Through a Glass Darkly" Cover: "Winter Stream," 1978 Photograph by David Heald.

• "The Praying Masters of My Soul" by Jonathan Omer-Man
  - Getting in step
• "The Interior Image" by Ananda K. Coomaraswamy
  - Aims of traditional portraiture
• "Jeremy" by Jacques Lusseyran
  - Buchenwald as mirror and microscope
• "Nirvana Is Samsara" by P. L. Travers
  - A poem
• "Reflection" by Marie-Louise von Franz
  - Four currents of exchange
• From The Annotated Alice by Martin Gardner
  - Looking-glass sense and nonsense
• "Through a Glass Darkly" by D.M. Dooling
  - The roots of distortion
• ARCS: "A Wondrous Affinity"
• "The Only Freedom"
  - An interview with Helen M. Luke
• "The Mirrors of Mahayana" by Frederick Franck
  - Opening to the light
• "Or So the Story Goes" by Peter Brook
  - A fable
• "Looking through the Mirror of Life" by Claire R. Farrer and Bernard Second
  - Conversations with a Mescalero Apache Singer

Tangents - Reviews

• "A Gift of Metaphor" by Rob Baker
  - Isak Dinesen's Africa, revisited

Epicycles - Traditional stories from around the world

• "The Courtesan's Fee" / Jataka
• "The Quarrel" / Buddhist
• "The Dark Mirror" / Rumi
• "The Bright Mirror" / Rumi
• "The Gorgon's Head" / Greek
• "Wooing the Ducks" / Caribbean
• "Urashima Taro" / Shinto